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Cern's potential new particle discovery is 'a total game changer'

The team at Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland may have discovered a new particle. In its first set of significant results since the upgrade earlier this year, LHC researchers have observed large spikes in energy that could be the result of particle collisions between a new boson even larger than the Higgs.

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If it turns out that the data does indeed represent a new particle it would be "a total game changer," Gian Francesco Giudice, a Cern theorist who wasn't involved in the discovery, told Nature. "The Higgs boson pales in comparison, in terms of novelty."

The results appear to confirm speculation about a new discovery at the LHC that has been circulating on social media for the last couple of days. Judging by the results, the particle -- if it is a new discovery -- would be about four times larger than the top quark, the heaviest particle so far discovered. And it would be six times bigger than the Higgs.

The announcement comes after the researchers spotted unexpected spikes in energy that reflect a collision between super-high energy protons. The different teams working at the LHC have similar results -- they both saw an excess number of pairs of photons each carrying around 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) of energy. They believe this could have come from the decay of a new 1,500 GeV particle.

CERN

"It's a little intriguing," Dave Charlton, a spokesperson for Cern's Atlas experiment, told Nature. "But it can happen by coincidence."

The reason Cern has published the results -- which it wouldn't normally do with so little evidence -- is that both the Atlas and CMS teams saw the same thing. Atlas saw 40 incidences of the 750 GeV energy pairs, and CMS saw 10.

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But it could just be a statistical bump, which occurs all the time. "We expect about ten times as much data next year, which should help resolve this question – but quite likely throw up new ones," Charlton continued.

The researchers expect to verify whether this represents a new particle or just a "bump" in 2016. "If there is an actual natural phenomenon behind these fluctuations, we will know," Tiziano Camporesi, a Cern physicist on the CMS team, told Nature.